During my first years of fieldwork on Lemnos and Thasos, I often felt frustrated because I was constantly getting lost when looking for potential Late Byzantine sites that were not obvious on the map or on the landscape. Part of the problem was that my informants – who were always eager to help and very knowledgeable about the landscape and its toponyms – insisted on guiding me on the basis of rock formations, specific trees, or even smells and sounds as obvious landmarks. Since all fig trees looked the same to me, there were too many rock formations from which to choose, and the rural landscape was surprisingly full of sounds and smells, I often went astray (Fig. 5.1). In the process I made many new friends who forgave my trespassing and offered to point out these mysterious landmarks that I continuously missed. In my conversations with them, it was clear that their mental mapping of the region was very different from my own. I was looking at dots on maps, whereas they had an embodied knowledge of the landscape that allowed them to both imagine it and describe it through movement, smells, sounds, shapes, and colors. Their experiences, daily activities, and local knowledge allowed them to anticipate and reconstruct their landscape through a physical, emotional, and cognitive process.